This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 1:51 am and is filed under General Word Vomit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
“You need a regular hangout.”
It’s probably the most sensible advice I’ve gotten on how to meet a guy, which is actually unfortunate, as it leaves me without excuse now. I took great pleasure in shooting down the myriad of idiotic suggestions I received from people whose main knowledge about dating was garnered from Meg Ryan and Jennifer Aniston movies. You want me to place a personal ad? Fuck you, Match.com’s archive of devoid losers hasn’t changed in five years. You want me to take salsa lessons? Fuck you, have you seen the havoc ten years of ballet reaped on my feet?
What insults me most about suggestions like these isn’t so much their lack of real world foundation (because really, the only people taking salsa lessons are women with their gay male friends), but the fact that they were offered with so little regard for who I am. Even when you get past my snark-soaked, I’m-smarter-than-you-are exterior, you are not going to find a deliberate “joiner.” Nor will you find a person who relishes meeting people, or even dating at all.
If I could skip the whole dating process, I would. But for as much as I hate dating, I absolutely love being in a relationship. The satisfaction I get from connecting with a person is profound, and, sadly, rare.
This is why getting over my last relationship is an ongoing struggle: it didn’t end because of “us” or our connection with each other. Of course, I can’t really say my commitment to getting over the relationship is all that strong, seeing as how I spent several hours the other night reading every single email he’s sent me in the past three years. Damn Yahoo and their unlimited data storage.
Along with making my drinking problem all the more vivid, reading those emails confirmed just how much being in that relationship meant to me. Short of egging his house or gouging out my eyes, I’m still searching for the best way to accept that I need to start over.
I’m doing better than I thought I would, at least in that when I play the “Last time I …” game, I don’t have to insert my ex’s name as often. Which means the last time I went out to dinner, and the last time I went to a concert, and the last time I had sex was not with my ex, and I’m told that’s a start.
The hardest part is to alter the game so that I can look ahead and say, “The next time I …” and not have it include phrases like, “…finish off a bottle of whiskey” or “…spend another night reading about serial killers.” These have been easy things to do, just as it has been extremely easy to settle for solitude.
But when my friend B casually suggested I find a place to hang out that wasn’t on my couch, I had to admit it wasn’t a horrible idea. She wasn’t telling me to take a pottery class (which ranks up there as the single worst unsolicited idea I’ve ever been given), and she wasn’t even really telling me to date someone. She just planted the idea that getting out there and finding a place to do what I like might be a decent way to ease myself back into the world outside myself.
Of course, I’m not entirely sure she meant for me to make a habit of heading to my local rock club every weekend, but a girl, especially a girl like me, has gotta start somewhere, right?